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Nathan Swapp
Luna, NM
Interview: February 18, 2011
My name is Nathan Swapp. I have retired to Luna. I was born and raised here. My great-grandpa was among the first settlers of Luna. I was born August 20, 1945 in Silver City, NM. My mother’s name was Anna Fay Thompson Swapp. My dad’s name was Don Swapp. My dad was born in Reserve. My mother was born here in Luna. Mother’s mother was a Skousen up in Alpine. They lived on the north side of Luna Lake. Mother’s father was Webb Thompson. I am not sure where he came from.
From the history I remember, the Swapps first came out of Utah probably with some of the Mormon settlers. The Luna valley at that time was a sheep ranch run by a gentleman named Solomon Luna. I think most of the first people settled in near Spur Lake (north of town) and lived there and then settled the town later.
My dad made his living running cattle. He had cattle permits with his brother, Phil. My dad drove a truck and hauled lumber a lot back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Mother ran the mail to Spur Lake. She cooked here at the school and I think a little bit over at Reserve. Up to the time she passed away she worked in the hospital in Silver City.
I went to school here in Luna, in the old original school. You can see the foundation marks from here (Community Center). Then when they built this one I went here through the 8th grade. Then we rode the bus to Reserve for high school. I graduated high school in 1963.
We had lots of chores. Every day in the mornings, we had chickens to feed, pigs to feed, a cow to milk. Then we’d take the cow and put her in the pasture. We got ready and rode the bus to school. Then when we got home we had juniper firewood to cut for the cook stove, pine firewood for the fireplace, and pigs to take care of. We had to go to the pasture and find the cow and bring her home and milk her. Then slop the pigs and do your homework. We always had something to do. In the summertime we got to weed the garden. Just up the hill we had a big field of corn we had to weed.
When we were kids we got to go out and help the folks with the cattle and branding. Then in November when we shipped, both Grandfather and Uncle Phil would drive all the cattle and put them up here in the wheat pasture. Then early in the morning we’d get up and go to the pasture and drive them across the road to the shipping pens. Then we got to play around out there.
Whoever bought the cattle would ship them to feed lots. I think at this time a good portion of them went to the packing plant in Deming. I know there is a big one down there. It depended on who gave them the best price. They’d weigh them, load them in big trucks, and take them away. Dad only had about 30 cows at that time. Grandpa and Uncle Phil had a lot more, but I wouldn’t guess how many.
After high school I joined the Navy in 1963. I spent 26 years in the Navy. Then I went to work for Northrup-Grumman as an instructor building weapons systems for the military. I worked at Air Force Plant No.42 in Palmdale (CA). I was an instructor, and taught and certified all the mechanics that built various parts of the airplanes they had. They had B2 bombers and a lot of the unmanned planes they are flying now. On those I got to certify all the mechanics. I worked there for 20 years and then we came back here.
We came back to Luna in December, 2007. We’ve always had some property up west of town that we got from Grandfather. We had a travel trailer for awhile. We’d come back here on vacations. Then we put a little larger one there and then stayed for awhile. We tried to buy a home in Show Low and the real estate agent messed that up. So we had this property and we just came here and built this house. We live on the south side of the property up there across the river. (west of Luna).
I am really into cars. My first car wasn’t really mine. Mother and Dad bought a ‘57 Dodge and gave us the old ‘54 Dodge, a four-door stick shift. We kept it and played with it. Then I had a ‘47 Dodge pickup we played with. The red one used to be up at the old house but it disappeared a couple of years ago. The first one I had that I actually bought was a ‘52 Desoto, while I was in the military. It had the old style clutch. We’d shift and get it in gear then it would shift automatically the rest of the time.
I am building one from scratch now. We found a Kellison Stallion. It looks like the Shelby Cobras. It had been sitting idol for seventeen years. They couldn’t get it running. So we bought it in 1994, took it all apart, and completely re-did it, even painted it. We used to take it to all the car shows in California. Eight or nine years ago I got this idea to build a GT 40 from scratch. So I am working on it. I had to quit while we built the house. I have this shop up there behind the house so I can work in winter. But I like cars.
We had some hard times when we were growing up. I remember when we didn’t have much. We used to take steak sandwiches to high school and trade them for spam and stuff because we got tired of eating steak. We’d get deer, and dad would hang them out in the tree behind the house, or out in the barn. Every morning he’d just go down there, unwrap the tarp, cut off some meat, bring it in and cook it up for breakfast. In the winter time if we needed something hot, we’d go out and get some oats, put them on the cookie sheet in the oven and brown them then stir them into hot water. I don’t know if you call it oat tea or oat coffee. We didn’t eat stuff like they do now. Our dinner consisted of bread and milk usually. On a good day you’d get a handful of raisins with it. Mother always had biscuits and gravy and stuff like that for breakfast. She’d make homemade bread all the time.
The old house we lived in was two rooms. There was a living room and a kitchen which is still up there now. They’ve added some porches around it but it is still there. In the summer time our beds were put on the porch and we slept there. When it was cold in the wintertime we put our beds out in the granary. We slept out there. There just wasn’t enough room in the house for six kids. Mother and Dad’s bedroom was really the living room. We had to take our bath in an old tin tub sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. We had to heat the water on the stove. At one time we had a stove that had a reservoir on the right hand side to heat water. That wasn’t enough for everybody. You’d go to the well and hand pump the water out. We never had running water in the house until after I went in the military.
My sisters and brothers are still here except for my older brother. He is back in Virginia. The next one under him, Horace, lives in Eagar. Then Inez is under him, she lives in Tyrone, NM. She is married to Gary Hulsey so there is a lot of Luna there. Then Kenneth built a house close to us here, but he comes in the summer. He lives in California. Then my youngest brother, Ron lives in Silver City, NM. Usually everybody comes up here for the Pioneer Days in July. We have a big cook-out. We all had property side by side, but some of my siblings sold theirs. Everybody pretty much comes up and we do the Pioneer celebration and all that sort of stuff.
One of the biggest events for us was when we had to go to either Silver City or El Paso, TX before school began so we could get new shoes and things for school. We had to wear our new shoes all year. If we wore them out then in summer we’d have to go barefoot. If we didn’t wear them out we’d wear them all summer, then before school started we got to go get a new pair of shoes.
Mother used to buy flour here in the Luna store. Sometimes she bought it in Silver City when Dad had to haul lumber down there. Then they’d go shopping. If it was your turn you got to go to the store with her and pick out the flour sack because she was going to make you a shirt out of it.
It was a good life. You learned to do things differently than they do nowadays. I drove people crazy when I worked for Northrup Grumman. I worked for them for 17 years and never missed a day of work, never took a day’s sick time. But like I used to tell the kids that came to work there, “They hire you to come to work not to call in sick. ‘Cause, if you call in sick, then somebody else has to do your work. And they didn’t hire an extra person”.
But it was a good life. We used to do little crazy things like kids do, and get in trouble. There were several kids my age in town and we’d run around on the weekends and shoot the road signs, and stuff like that.
There are changes in Luna. People don’t go out of their way to help other people, like they used to. I think there are a lot of people here who don’t work. We had to work for what little we had. I worked at the saw mill for a couple of summers before I got out of high school. You got a dollar- and- a- quarter an hour. But it was something to do. You got a little extra money, gas money, etc. Of course there wasn’t much going on here. We had to either go to Springerville or Reserve to the dances. I remember one school teacher, I don’t remember his name, who had an old Hudson Hornet. He used to rent movies and he’d charge a dime a person and he’d show them right here (at the school) on Friday nights.
After they built this school house, and the old one was empty next door, we ended up with all these roller skates from somewhere. I think maybe the community bought them for us. We used the old school. It had two big rooms with a sliding partition you could open. Thursday or Friday nights you could rent skates for a nickel and go skating.
It’s a whole different way of life. We worked hard, we didn’t have much, but we enjoyed it. We used to like to go to Grandmother’s because she had a wood stove that had the warming ovens on top and she always had those full of biscuits. Everybody had cellars. The fruit peddlers would come from up around Farmington and they’d bring lots of peaches and pears. We’d buy what we could and can them all. Of course we had gardens and we’d can all of that. We had a place underneath the kitchen floor. When we were building the house we put sand down there. That is where you buried your potatoes and carrots and all of that. When you needed something you’d go down and dig through the sand and get what you needed. We used to go down on the Blue and pick the wild grapes and Mom would make grape jelly out of them.
We used to be able to go out into the forest anywhere we wanted. Now they’ve cut back on that. I don’t know; it’s changed a lot. A lot of the old buildings are gone. That pink house right above the service station is where I was born and raised. And the one across the street with all the animals, that used to be Grandpa’s place. Uncle Phil lived just across the river where you are going out of town toward Reserve. He has passed away. Our cousin Dennis has that now. But that was Uncle Phil’s, my dad’s brother’s place. Aunt Ellen (Kiehne) , who just passed away recently, was Dad’s sister. She lived in the very last place along this road. Dad’s other sister, Hessie, married Harold Whitmer up in Alpine where they lived a number of years. They passed away while I was in the service. His other sister, Nida married Doyle (Turkey) Bradford and they ran the Luna Service Station forever.
There were a number of Swapps here. The Swapps and the Laney’s were the first ones here, the way I remember it. Great Grandpa had a house over where Uncle Phil’s is now. It was over on the river bank. It burned down when I was about 7 years old. All of Grandpa’s brothers, Uncle Loman and Uncle Grant, worked for the Forest Service. One of them was the Forest Ranger in Reserve for years. I remember visiting them there. Most of them moved up around Farmington. Jimmy Swapp still lives up there. He was a highway patrolman for years. They were up there where all the orchards are.
A treat we used to have growing up was celebrating Fourth of July in Springerville. We always got to go over there. When we got to be teenagers we were able to drive cars, if we’d stay out of trouble. On Sunday afternoon we’d go up to Alpine to a café where Bear Wallow is now. Only it wasn’t quite that big. They had juke boxes and we’d go up there and play records and eat pie and ice cream. There was a small café in Reserve where Uncle Bill’s Bar is now. Then there was Jake’s store. Next to Jake’s was a movie theater. Then next door there was a little café. It was about 18 feet wide and forty feet long, and it had a kitchen in the back. In Reserve the old high school was right down below the hill. On the road that went up the hill there was a drugstore and they had a soda fountain in there. In Luna, if you drive past where the old store and post office is now, there was a Pine Cone Café on the main road. It’s where the old empty building is that has all the doors hanging loose. The owner would run it for a year or so and then she’d close it. You could always get ice cream there when she was open.
The old store that has the fence around it, near the post office, was owned by Uncle Tom and Aunt Ellen (Kiehne). When they set off the atomic bomb in ‘45 over at White Sands it shook bottles off the store shelves onto the floor. My wife said that the first time she came to Luna with me, the store was still open. The post office was still inside the store. It was really neat. She was looking at the shelves and saw a can of baking powder. So she tipped it over and looked at it, and it had been expired for about ten years.
When spring came you’d find old bicycles laying around out back. Uncle Turkey, Nida’s husband who ran the service station, would let you go down and use his patch stuff to fix the tires, get them stretched and straighten out the rims and fix everything so we’d have them to ride during the summer.
When I got a little older I was able to drive. Then if you did all your chores they might let you borrow one of the cars or pickups and go somewhere and do something. Saturday mornings, when Dad was hauling lumber, he’d let us rotate the tires on the truck and change the oil.
When Mom and Dad would go to the store they’d go to Springerville or Silver City, NM. They would always tell you, “Now you don’t drive any of the vehicles.” So of course, you’d wait until they were past the point-of-no-return, then you would go out and play with those vehicles. Welburn and Horace, who were my two oldest brothers, went out screwing around and got Daddy’s truck and took off. They went down through the field and around and they came back. On the way they had run over a little pine tree. So the boys stood the tree back up and nailed it up. It was okay until the tree died and Dad went out to figure out why it died.
The people who live here that were born here, don’t mind doing a day’s work. I was talking to Dennis Swapp last 4th of July and he told me, “You know, when I was growing up, if you had told me there would come a day when I didn’t know everybody in Luna, I would have told you that you were crazy. Now, I don’t know half the people that are here.” They come in from here and there. Some come in and stay for the summer. A lot of people have moved in and bought land here. We don’t have a lot to do with town so we stay home and do our own thing. A lot of the folks do the same.